Through the Glass Darkly
by gloryblastit
Summary: Come into a darker Sweet Valley than you have ever known.


16 year old Elizabeth Wakefield walked down a sunny Southern California street on a Saturday. She had cares, but was trying to put them to the side. Her writing, for one thing. She was in the fabled land of "writer's block". She could start stories, sure, but halfway through her characters began to seem like cardboard cut outs, no more real than that. And Todd, Todd. Something was weird with him, there was some look in his eyes that she couldn't interpret.  
  
It was a typical Southern California day, blue blue sky, bright disc of a sun continuing to lighten her sun kissed blond hair, blue green eyes squinted against the bright day.  
  
She slipped into a store that was a favorite of hers and her twin. It sold gloriously over priced clothes, the fabrics all silk and sheer gossamers, finely knit Italian lace. She fingered a blouse, wondering if she had enough money with her to buy it.  
  
"Hey! Hey you!" The owner began pointing at her, a look of righteous indignation on her firm botox face, dyed yellowish hair pulled up in a loose bun.  
  
Elizabeth could not believe that the woman was speaking to her.  
  
"Me?" Elizabeth said, pointing at herself.  
  
"Yeah, you. And don't play Miss Innocent with me. I told you to get out. To get out and stay out," The woman's tone was hard and her eyes unflinching.  
  
"But I="  
  
"I said out!"  
  
Shaken, Elizabeth left. Back in the bright day, heart and head pounding in reaction, she came to a plausible explanation for the owner's strange behavior. Jessica.  
  
Jessica must have done something in that store and been kicked out for it. As often happens Elizabeth had been mistaken for her sister. There was no telling them apart.  
  
So she headed home, where she knew Jessica was still curled up in bed. She'd find out what pile of shit Jessica had stepped into now.  
  
At home she found her parents sipping coffee in the sunny kitchen, the paper spread before them. Behind them, beyond the glass French doors, the kidney shaped pool sparkled in the sun.  
  
"Jess up?" Elizabeth said. Her parents looked up briefly, smiled at her with their white chicklet teeth, and shook their heads no.  
  
"I wouldn't wake her," her mother cautioned, lightly buttering a non fat English muffin, "she must have got in very late last night. I didn't even hear her come in,"  
  
"I'll risk it," But her mother's words worried her. Something was going on with Jessica, Elizabeth had begun to sense it in the deep part of her cells, where she and Jessica had once been one.  
  
Upstairs, just the ordinary carpeted stairs flanked with the blond wood railing that Elizabeth had trailed her hand lightly along countless times. But the stairs had taken on the horror movie aspect of dread as Elizabeth realized that what she would see would be...would be? She didn't have words for the formless dread that had begun to build from the pearly strands of DNA, little twists of genetic material she had shared with her sister. It rose from there to cell nucleus, protoplasm, cell membrane, interstitial spaces until it shook through her whole body and she closed her large blue green eyes, eyes like a calm ocean on a hazy day, the exact shape and shade of Jessica's eyes. 'This is what it would feel like,' Elizabeth thought, 'if Jessica was dead,' and a heart pounding terror filled her ears with her rushing blood and a white hot needle of a headache began behind her eyes in twin points of pain and she wondered, almost out loud, 'had Jessica died?'  
  
Down the hall, carpeted in the same shade of soft rose as the stairs, past the door to her room and on to Jessica's room.  
  
She was undeniably alive. As Elizabeth approached the closed door she knew that. She also knew that something was terribly wrong.  
  
"Jess? Jessica?" She pushed open the door. The room was dark, heavy shades drawn, bed rumpled but empty. Clothes draped over chairs, the headboard, hanging on knobs. School books scattered across her cluttered desk top, covered in brown grocery bags and those covered in Jessica's strange hieroglyphics graffitti.  
  
"Jessica?"  
  
A sound, not an answer but a strangled little noise coming from the corner. Jessica sat there, her back to the corner, knees drawn up to her chest, starring at Elizabeth, through Elizabeth.  
  
"Jessica? What's wrong?" Elizabeth came closer slowly, like one would with a hurt, frightened animal. Jessica flinched and tried to back up but the wall at her back prevented it.  
  
It was strange to see a look so alien on a face identical to her own.  
  
"Jessica?" She was as close as she wanted to get, about an arm's length away. Her mind traveled at lightening speed a map of what might be wrong.  
  
"You," Jessica hissed, her eyes narrowing in suspicion and in fear. Elizabeth didn't know how she had missed it but one of Jessica's eyes was black and blue, there was blood at the corner of her mouth, the clothes she wore, the clothes from last night, were torn...  
  
"Oh my God,"  
  
"Jessica, c'mon, you need to go to the hospital," Elizabeth tried to help her up but Jessica pulled away as though Elizabeth had burned her.  
  
"Leave me alone, leave me alone,"  
  
"Jessica..."  
  
And Jessica began screaming, the screams piercing through the tender meat of Elizabeth's brain, the screams, at that pitch, sounding the exact way Elizabeth's own voice sounded in her head. 


End file.
